"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. ”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Friday, March 10, 2006

Kurita keeps up the fight!

Kurita acknowledges that on the war issue she's to the left of Ford, who voted for the war in 2002 and, though critical of President Bush's management of the war, has never disavowed his original support. Kurita has a concrete proposal: Take our ground troops out of the cities, where they are "magnets" to the growing insurgency, and maintain air support for the struggling new Iraqi government. It's a strategy that's arguably a prelude to orderly withdrawal.

Kurita's increasing forthrightness on the war and on Iraq itself ("Let's face it. Iraq ought to be three countries, not one," she has said on other recent occasions) is one of the factors that make her at least a theoretical alternative to the nationally ballyhooed Ford.

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... Something she shares with many of her Second Amendment-minded constituents is ease around firearms -- shotguns, especially. Though she shies away from hunting game, she's won a few awards for skeet shooting and is not bashful about proclaiming the fact.

Kurita's vita on the Tennessee General Assembly Web site shows her as a member of no fewer than five gun or skeet clubs. It's a fact that occasionally draws a worried question from the audiences of diehard progressive Democrats who have begun to rally to her standard because they're even more worried about what they see as Ford's increasing conservatism.

Southwest Tennessee State College professor Steve Haley hosted a recent Memphis fund-raiser for Kurita. He asked her: "Would you support reasonable gun-control measures?"

"What do you mean reasonable?" Kurita parried, going on to answer the question in such a way as to indicate, without quite saying so, that she was open at least to conversation on the subject.

And she was given a "favorable" notation on her legislative record in the state senate by the Tennessee Firearms Assoc.. (PDF file)